What do city's school 'report cards' really mean to Staten Island parents?

Staten Island Advance photoSchools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said of the Department of Education's grades for individual schools, "By measuring how well our schools prepare students for high school, the Progress Reports set the right goals for success in these formative grades."

In what has become an annual fall tradition, the city Department of Education just released its “report cards” - officially called progress reports - on the public schools around the five boroughs amid much hoopla.

And, as usual, there was much celebration in the schools that scored high marks and upset in the schools that didn’t. (The results were disappointingly mixed for Staten Island public schools.)

Of course, people are naturally interested in such rankings, and the grades have again generated a lot of buzz.

But again, we think it’s fair to ask the question: What do the grades really mean?

The official explanation is that the reports measure schools against others of comparable demographic makeup across the city, with standardized test results factoring in heavily.

But the grades also measure individual schools based upon their students’ test performances in previous years.

Therein lies the rub - or multiple rubs.

For example, what metrics (as DOE officials like to say) does the department use to assign a school to one demographic category or another for the purposes of grading them?

The department does identify that array of measures it uses but the connections it makes between them are complex and confusing.

Even more problematic, schools are effectively forced to compete against themselves from year to year. So a school that gets an “A” or a “B” in one year could get a lower grade the next if its students’ statistical performance doesn’t improve or declines.

In other words, schools can actually be penalized for having students who perform at consistently higher levels from year to year. What effect does that have on students, parents, teachers and administrators?

Clearly, there’s a law of diminishing returns at work here: The better a school is to begin with, the harder it is for that school to earn a higher grade or even retain the grade it had the year before.

That inability to move even higher is why schools that have a good reputation can earn Cs in successive years.

Meanwhile, lower-performing schools that show any improvement can be awarded higher grades - higher even than what better schools may get in some cases.

Then, too, curricula change and the standards used in calculating the progress reports change as well. That makes it even more difficult to compare schools from year to year.

This ostensibly objective system is more than a little tainted by subjectivity, as even school officials concede. That’s shown by the number of multiple-C schools that have not been placed on the “struggling” schools list by the DOE.

The Michael J. Petrides School, for example, got its third C in a row for the 2011-12 school year, but was exempted from the DOE’s list of “struggling” schools because of its generally high standardized test scores.

Meanwhile, other schools have been targeted for intervention for back-to-back C grades.

That leads to the question of whether these “report cards” are really of any use to parents. Do they tell parents much of anything, given how the DOE uses them?

And are more parents going to take their kids out of the familiar neighborhood school just because it got a C of highly dubious significance?

That’s doubtful.

We understand the city’s desire to assess the performances at the schools, but, as with the city’s other attempts to evaluate its operations, this overly broad, vague and highly subjective rating system is a far cry from being a reliable measure.